9/2/09

Pockets Full of Memories -- Complexity Art

On 1 Sept 2009 I posted on the "SOM for qualitative data" work done by Timo Honkela and colleagues at the Helsinki University of Technology. Exploring Timo Honkela's work further, I found out that he and his colleagues are also involved in the application of the SOM to the world of art.

They were involved (2003-2006) in an incredible interactive exhibition at the Centre Pompidou Museum of Modern Art in Paris.Here is a brief description of the exhibition from the website--which you can visit by clicking here.

"Pockets Full of Memories" is an interactive installation that consists of a data collection station where the public takes a digital image of an object, adds descriptive keywords, and rates its properties using a touchscreen. The data accumulates through-out the length of the exhibition. The Kohonen self-organizing map algorithm is used to organize the data, moving the images of the objects into an ordered state according to similarities defined by the contributors’ semantic descriptions. The archive of objects is projected large-scale on the walls of the gallery space showing various visualizations such as the objects positioned in the 2D matrix, their movement over time, and textual descriptions. The audience can also interact with the data online to access descriptions of the objects and to contribute comments and messages to each object from anywhere in the world.